We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

Peer Review: If these shams are manifesting in medical science what does it suggest about the social sciences?

I don’t know who said it first but science is a tool more than a body of knowledge, and that body of knowledge is in constant flux. There were several articles a while back reporting on how many peer reviewed articles have been recanted and/or withdrawn. Between conflicts of interest, grants (regardless of source: public/private), coopted peer review, fiddling with the data(especially anything exculpatory), the CULT of models/algorithms, I am very skeptical of academia, and not just the soft sciences. Don’t forget that success in academia is all about getting published, and padding the resume.

A number of physicists claim there is no crisis, there are just confused physicists. See, eg, Lubos Motl:

http://motls.blogspot.com

Motl argues that most of the phoney crisis is due to people who in fact reject quantum mechanics and insist on a classical, nonquantum, view of reality, with particles that have real positions and momenta that are independent of observation.

They prattle on about the "mysterious collapse of the wave function," which on analysis seems to be a simple confusion about the meaning of probabilties.

They claim that quantum mechanics and relativity are incompatible. That's true enough if you mean Einstein's relativity, which is the last fruit of classical, 19th Century physics. Einstein himself was the last great 19th physicist. But, string theory although incomplete already shows signs that it provides a true quantum gravity, and not just a "quantized" version of General Relativity.

And string theory continues to integrate all sorts of things central to modern physics. It does predict undetected particles, and some may be more massive than the LHC can produce. However, some of it predictions may be found in the next year or so, as the LHC reaches full power.

String theory is almost certainly correct. We will see it more clearly as it continues to progress, and leave the 19th Century physicists behind.

And string theory continues to integrate all sorts of things central to modern physics. It does predict undetected particles, and some may be more massive than the LHC can produce. However, some of it predictions may be found in the next year or so, as the LHC reaches full power.

String theory is almost certainly correct. We will see it more clearly as it continues to progress, and leave the 19th Century physicists behind.

I see you're into scientism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism

But there is a crisis in physics, and nowhere more evident than in cosmology - where 20th Century physicists have already been left behind. For decades, in some cases.

The Higgs flop - along with the humorous repurposing of the LHC from a God Particle finder into a big bang-disproving device - is the tip of the iceberg.

As a footnote, I find it amusing that rock-ribbed classical types have faithfully resorted to the miraculous Big Bang - a terrifically faulted theory - as proof of their scientific rigor and objectivity. Evidently the Genesis record is a Darwinian tale, say they...

Entire swaths of standard model cosmology and related physics are unscientific. We've allowed speculative scientism to become dogmatic belief system, loudly asserted cause, effect, and trajectory even against emerging facts. Science must remain a method in order to be scientific.

I suspect that the way things are going, standard string theory will fail too. Sykes may want to rethink conflating it with either Einstein or quantum relativity.

. A pre-Enlightenment Age is not just the absence of uncomfortable free expression. It is also a sort of groupthink acceptance of a lie in place of the truth on grounds of social utility.

.. Science, logic, probability, evidence — all these cornerstones of the Enlightenment — now mean little in comparison to the race, class, and gender of those who offer narratives deemed socially useful.

... In our current Dark Age, logic is ignored in lieu of ideology.

.... A final symptom of an un-Enlightened age is the assumption that lies are truth because untruth offers collective benefits, while veracity disrupts social justice.

..... Blasphemy is now defined as daring to use logic and evidence to expose the state’s failed, deductive tenets.

This descent into the Dark Ages will not end well. It never has in the past.

Those are interesting, The most amazing story I know is of Charles Schwab, the first president of US Steel. Before the Depression, he blew through most of his fortune - estimated at between $25M - $40M (between $500M and $800M today) and after the crash of '29, he was pretty much finished and died penniless.

Baron von Steuben certainly deserves his place in the history of the US Army.

However, here's another significant figure who gets too far little acknowledgment in your history: Winfield Scott, "Old Fuss and Feathers", the man who got his start in the War of 1812 and was still serving when the Civil War began.

It was Scott who got a grip of your army during that period, codifying its drill, tactics and administration, building and leading it through the Mexican-American War and finally taking an instrumental part in devising the strategy behind the Anaconda Plan.

I've often said that it was very fortunate for Canada that there were far too few Scotts in the ranks of the US Army in the War of 1812.

"If you aren’t terrified yet, wait until they start applying these lunatic principles to surgeons and airline pilots."
It already is applied to surgeons. The next time you go to the doctor, think about how the Dr. got where he (or she) is. Did he get into med school because of a quota? Was he passed through classes and tests to meet the correct quota for graduates?

the warmal colding fetish has a long track record of failed predictions. we're still waiting for the Comin' Ice Age promised back in the 1970s. fortunately we didn't spend billions of dollars to forestall the ice because now its global warming, or something, because for every prediction of disaster, there's a corresponding prediction of a disaster that didn't happen. according to al-Bore, the arctic has been ice free since 2013.

warmal colding's best predictions are set just far enough in the future to raise panic and spend tax dollars, and not be put to the test. its just a con game.

AGW is all an effort to inject "science" into a new Ehrlichian (named for Paul Ehrilch who was wrong on virtually every one of his predictions of catastrophes) scheme to panic everybody into depriving us of our freedom. The reason nothing was done to combat global cooling is because, at least from my memory, nobody had figured out how to make a political issue out of it. Those were such naive times!

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